The Terminological Resources of Lay Readers: Do LovelyBooks Users Distinguish fiktiv from fiktional?

This study investigates the terminological resources of lay readers, focusing on a key distinction in German-language fictionality theory as an example: the distinction between fiktional, which literary scholars use to refer to representational media or utterances, and fiktiv, which they use to qualify phenomena that are represented by such media or utterances and/or that do not exist in the real world. While non-professional readers also use these terms, they are sometimes assumed to conflate them. Drawing on a corpus of over 300,000 reviews from the German-language social reading platform LovelyBooks, the article investigates whether users distinguish between fiktiv and fiktional at all, and to what extent their usage aligns with the standard understanding of these terms in literary studies.

An annotation study shows that LovelyBooks users do in fact differentiate between fiktiv and fiktional with regard to the phenomena to which they apply these terms. Reviewers tend to use fiktiv in ways consistent with scholarly conventions more often than not, whereas the usage of fiktional does not align systematically with the standard literary studies understanding of the term. An additional qualitative analysis suggests that conflations of fiktiv and fiktional may arise because distinguishing between the two is not essential for certain functions these terms serve on LovelyBooks. Overall, the article presents an ambivalent picture of readers’ terminological resources: not all follow a strict system of clear-cut distinctions, yet neither do they use terms such as fiktiv and fiktional in a completely haphazard manner.